High in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, just a few years before the Great War erupts across Europe, the young boy Beddou is sold by his father to apprentice as a shepherd. His broken-hearted mother gives him a strand of amber beads, promising they will guide him home. On the same day, a radiant Arabian mare is born in the Sultan’s palace. After years of cruelty by the shepherd, Beddou is freed, and for a brief, golden time, becomes master of the stunning mare. When she is stolen and taken to the frontlines of war in France, the boy sets off find her. These disparate events are two of the beads that make up the strand of story Elizabeth Letts strings together in Fallen for France.

Other beads are added to the thread as the story gains momentum. Hassan, Beddou’s hero and mentor, whose derring-do becomes both legend and farce, carries the novel’s weight throughout the opening chapters. The unscrupulous French soldier Jean-Baptiste, a Frenchman born in Morocco, but loyal to no one, casts dark shadows that leave readers cringing. Thomas Bellow, an Englishman contracted with the Blue Cross veterinary volunteers, saves more than just horses during the raging war. And finally, Estelle, who like the fiery mare herself, is woven in and out of the narrative with the deftness of a master storyteller.

The novel is at once an epic tale of a horse who binds together people from different worlds, and an examination of the forgotten role of colonial soldiers from North Africa in the world’s first truly global war.

Love in its many forms compels the story. Beddou longs for his mother somewhere in the Atlas Mountains; Hassan can’t release the love he feels for the dancing girl Louhou back in Morocco; Estelle searches for her severely handicapped younger brother captured by the Germans; and Thomas grieves for his dead sister. In as much as love informs the motivations of each character, the love story between Thomas and Estelle compounds the tension without complicating or sentimentalizing the plot.

Fallen For France is a work of heart by the author. A self-described horse-crazy girl who grew up to become a horse-loving woman, author Letts is not a newbie when it comes to writing about horses. She has written three award-winning, narrative nonfiction bestsellers, The Eighty Dollar Champion, The Perfect Horse, and The Ride of her Life (as well as three other novels).

It’s also a deeply personal novel that draws from the author’s experiences serving with the Peace Corps in Morocco. It’s there she met her husband and has returned to his native village in the Atlas Mountains many times through the years and is still enthralled by his family’s storytelling. She admits to drawing from his family history and shared stories between the pages of Fallen For France, but the individual characters and plot are completely drawn from her imagination.Letts shares much about the development of Fallen For France in a personal note at the close of the novel.

Fallen For France will be available for purchase August 26, 2026, but is available for pre-order now at your favorite bookseller.